Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at generating synthetic data, but ensuring its quality and diversity remains challenging. We propose Genetic Prompt, a novel framework that combines genetic algorithms with LLMs to augment synthetic data generation. Our approach treats semantic text attributes as gene sequences and leverages the LLM to simulate crossover and mutation operations. This genetic process enhances data quality and diversity by creating novel attribute combinations, yielding synthetic distributions closer to real-world data. To optimize parent selection, we also integrate an active learning scheme that expands the offspring search space. Our experiments on multiple NLP tasks reveal several key findings: Genetic Prompt not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines but also shows robust performance across various generator model sizes and scales. Moreover, we demonstrate that fusing our synthetic data with the original training set significantly boosts downstream model performance, particularly for class-imbalanced scenarios. Our findings validate that Genetic Prompt is an effective method for producing high-quality synthetic data for a wide range of NLP applications.

Division of Epidemiology, Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale, AZ 85259, USA Hexian Zhang: chordzhang@connect.hku.hk Tel: (852) 2852 0128, Fax: (852) 2548 9464 A bstract word count: 1 85 T otal word count: 31 67 T otal number of tables: 2 T otal number of figures: 3 N umber of references: 32 Keywords Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning/Machine Learning, Dental Education, Electronic dental records, Periodontal Medicine Abstract Aims: Periodontology, with its wealth of structured clinical data, offers an ideal setting to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). This study aims to assess four LLMs (GPT - 4o, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Copilot, and DeepSeek V3) in interpreting longitudinal periodontal case vignettes through open - ended tasks. Materials and Methods: Thirty - four standardized longitudinal periodontal case vignettes were curated, generating 258 open - ended question - answer pairs. Each model was prompted to review case details and produce responses. Performance was evaluated using automated metrics (faithfulness, answer relevancy, readability) and blinded assessments by licensed dentists on a five - point Likert scale. Results: DeepSeek V3 achieved the highest median faithfulness score (0.528), outperforming GPT - 4o (0.457), Gemini 2.0 Flash (0.421), and Copilot (0.367).

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to capture users' dynamic interests and sequential patterns based on their historical interactions. Recently, the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have driven their adoption in SR. However, we identify two critical challenges in existing LLM-based SR methods: 1) embedding collapse when incorporating pre-trained collaborative embeddings and 2) catastrophic forgetting of quantized embeddings when utilizing semantic IDs. These issues dampen the model scalability and lead to suboptimal recommendation performance. Therefore, based on LLMs like Llama3-8B-instruct, we introduce a novel SR framework named MME-SID, which integrates multimodal embeddings and quantized embeddings to mitigate embedding collapse. Additionally, we propose a Multimodal Residual Quantized Variational Autoencoder (MM-RQ-VAE) with maximum mean discrepancy as the reconstruction loss and contrastive learning for alignment, which effectively preserve intra-modal distance information and capture inter-modal correlations, respectively. To further alleviate catastrophic forgetting, we initialize the model with the trained multimodal code embeddings. Finally, we fine-tune the LLM efficiently using LoRA in a multimodal frequency-aware fusion manner. Extensive experiments on three public datasets validate the superior performance of MME-SID thanks to its capability to mitigate embedding collapse and catastrophic forgetting. The implementation code and datasets are publicly available for reproduction: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MME-SID.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in high-stakes medical settings poses a critical AI alignment challenge, as models can inherit and amplify societal biases, leading to significant disparities. Existing fairness evaluation methods fall short in these contexts as they typically use simplistic metrics that overlook the multi-dimensional nature of medical harms. This also promotes models that are fair only because they are clinically inert, defaulting to safe but potentially inaccurate outputs. To address this gap, our contributions are mainly two-fold: first, we construct two large-scale, controlled benchmarks (ED-Triage and Opioid Analgesic Recommendation) from MIMIC-IV, comprising over 50,000 prompts with twelve race x gender variants and three context tiers. Second, we propose a multi-metric framework - Multi-faceted Fairness Assessment based on hARMs ($mFARM$) to audit fairness for three distinct dimensions of disparity (Allocational, Stability, and Latent) and aggregate them into an $mFARM$ score. We also present an aggregated Fairness-Accuracy Balance (FAB) score to benchmark and observe trade-offs between fairness and prediction accuracy. We empirically evaluate four open-source LLMs (Mistral-7B, BioMistral-7B, Qwen-2.5-7B, Bio-LLaMA3-8B) and their finetuned versions under quantization and context variations. Our findings showcase that the proposed $mFARM$ metrics capture subtle biases more effectively under various settings. We find that most models maintain robust performance in terms of $mFARM$ score across varying levels of quantization but deteriorate significantly when the context is reduced. Our benchmarks and evaluation code are publicly released to enhance research in aligned AI for healthcare.

Disputes between two parties occur in almost all domains such as taxation, insurance, banking, healthcare, etc. The disputes are generally resolved in a specific forum (e.g., consumer court) where facts are presented, points of disagreement are discussed, arguments as well as specific demands of the parties are heard, and finally a human judge resolves the dispute by often favouring one of the two parties. In this paper, we explore the use of large language models (LLMs) as assistants for the human judge to resolve such disputes, as part of our DRAssist system. We focus on disputes from two specific domains -- automobile insurance and domain name disputes. DRAssist identifies certain key structural elements (e.g., facts, aspects or disagreement, arguments) of the disputes and summarizes the unstructured dispute descriptions to produce a structured summary for each dispute. We then explore multiple prompting strategies with multiple LLMs for their ability to assist in resolving the disputes in these domains. In DRAssist, these LLMs are prompted to produce the resolution output at three different levels -- (i) identifying an overall stronger party in a dispute, (ii) decide whether each specific demand of each contesting party can be accepted or not, (iii) evaluate whether each argument by each contesting party is strong or weak. We evaluate the performance of LLMs on all these tasks by comparing them with relevant baselines using suitable evaluation metrics.

Multimodal models, such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, have demonstrated remarkable success in aligning visual and linguistic representations. However, these models exhibit limitations when applied to specialised visual domains, such as diagrams, which encode structured, symbolic information distinct from that of natural imagery. In this paper, we introduce a novel training paradigm explicitly designed to enhance the comprehension of diagrammatic images within vision-language models. Our approach uses ``hard'' samples for our proposed contrastive learning that incorporates two specialised loss functions that leverage the inherent structural properties of diagrams. By integrating these objectives into model training, our method enables models to develop a more structured and semantically coherent understanding of diagrammatic content. We empirically validate our approach on a benchmark dataset of flowcharts, as a representative class of diagrammatic imagery, demonstrating substantial improvements over standard CLIP and conventional hard negative CLIP learning paradigms for both image-text matching and visual question answering tasks. Our findings underscore the significance of tailored training strategies for specialised tasks and contribute to advancing diagrammatic understanding within the broader landscape of vision-language integration.

Heuristic and scaffolded teacher-student dialogues are widely regarded as critical for fostering students' higher-order thinking and deep learning. However, large language models (LLMs) currently face challenges in generating pedagogically rich interactions. This study systematically investigates the structural and behavioral differences between AI-simulated and authentic human tutoring dialogues. We conducted a quantitative comparison using an Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) coding scheme and Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA). The results show that human dialogues are significantly superior to their AI counterparts in utterance length, as well as in questioning (I-Q) and general feedback (F-F) behaviors. More importantly, ENA results reveal a fundamental divergence in interactional patterns: human dialogues are more cognitively guided and diverse, centered around a "question-factual response-feedback" teaching loop that clearly reflects pedagogical guidance and student-driven thinking; in contrast, simulated dialogues exhibit a pattern of structural simplification and behavioral convergence, revolving around an "explanation-simplistic response" loop that is essentially a simple information transfer between the teacher and student. These findings illuminate key limitations in current AI-generated tutoring and provide empirical guidance for designing and evaluating more pedagogically effective generative educational dialogue systems.

The extraction of critical patient information from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) poses significant challenges due to the complexity and unstructured nature of the data. Traditional machine learning approaches often fail to capture pertinent details efficiently, making it difficult for clinicians to utilize these tools effectively in patient care. This paper introduces a novel approach to extracting the OPQRST assessment from EHRs by leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose to reframe the task from sequence labeling to text generation, enabling the models to provide reasoning steps that mimic a physician's cognitive processes. This approach enhances interpretability and adapts to the limited availability of labeled data in healthcare settings. Furthermore, we address the challenge of evaluating the accuracy of machine-generated text in clinical contexts by proposing a modification to traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) metrics. This includes the integration of semantic similarity measures, such as the BERT Score, to assess the alignment between generated text and the clinical intent of the original records. Our contributions demonstrate a significant advancement in the use of AI in healthcare, offering a scalable solution that improves the accuracy and usability of information extraction from EHRs, thereby aiding clinicians in making more informed decisions and enhancing patient care outcomes.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked growing interest in their application to time series analysis tasks. However, their ability to perform complex reasoning over temporal data in real-world application domains remains underexplored. To move toward this goal, a first step is to establish a rigorous benchmark dataset for evaluation. In this work, we introduce the TSAIA Benchmark, a first attempt to evaluate LLMs as time-series AI assistants. To ensure both scientific rigor and practical relevance, we surveyed over 20 academic publications and identified 33 real-world task formulations. The benchmark encompasses a broad spectrum of challenges, ranging from constraint-aware forecasting to anomaly detection with threshold calibration: tasks that require compositional reasoning and multi-step time series analysis. The question generator is designed to be dynamic and extensible, supporting continuous expansion as new datasets or task types are introduced. Given the heterogeneous nature of the tasks, we adopt task-specific success criteria and tailored inference-quality metrics to ensure meaningful evaluation for each task. We apply this benchmark to assess eight state-of-the-art LLMs under a unified evaluation protocol. Our analysis reveals limitations in current models' ability to assemble complex time series analysis workflows, underscoring the need for specialized methodologies for domain-specific adaptation. Our benchmark is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Melady/TSAIA, and the code is available at https://github.com/USC-Melady/TSAIA.

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for "AI interviewers" that can administer voice-based surveys with respondents in real-time. This position paper reviews emerging evidence to understand when such AI interviewing systems are fit for purpose for collecting data within quantitative and qualitative research contexts. We evaluate the capabilities of AI interviewers as well as current Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems across two dimensions: input/output performance (i.e., speech recognition, answer recording, emotion handling) and verbal reasoning (i.e., ability to probe, clarify, and handle branching logic). Field studies suggest that AI interviewers already exceed IVR capabilities for both quantitative and qualitative data collection, but real-time transcription error rates, limited emotion detection abilities, and uneven follow-up quality indicate that the utility, use and adoption of current AI interviewer technology may be context-dependent for qualitative data collection efforts.